Post navigation

Pingree’s abortion fanaticism on display once again.

I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’m still appalled by a recent vote by Rep. Chellie Pingree, the congresswoman from southern Maine. As a matter of fact, all rational Mainers should be appalled and repulsed. Pingree voted against a bill that would have outlawed so-called sex-selective abortions. In short, if a woman is pregnant with a baby girl but wants a boy instead, she will have an abortion for that reason alone.

Such practices are common in China, with its one-child policy, and perhaps in other countries where male babies are preferred to females. But that doesn’t mean they should be tolerated in the United States, with our strong belief in human rights.

However, it seems now that we’re going to permit sex-selective abortions, with people like Pingree providing support. To her, no abortion can ever be wrong, no matter how cruel or callous. She even supports the unspeakable horror of partial-birth abortions, where the partially born infant has its brain sucked out and its skull crushed so the body can be pulled out.

On May 31, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on a bill called the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act. Because the bill was brought up under a suspension of House rules, it required a two thirds majority to pass. The bill received a pure majority – 246-168 – but not enough to clear the supermajority hurdle. Twenty Democrats voted for the bill, but not Pingree – and for what it’s worth, not Rep. Mike Michaud, either. Michaud’s “blue dog” conservative Democrat credentials are wearing a might thin these days, as he votes mostly in lockstep with his masters – Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.

The bill’s sponsor, U.S. Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz), noted that in 2007 the United States spearheaded a U.N. resolution to condemn sex-selection abortion worldwide. “Yet, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave,” he said, “we are the only advanced country left in the world that doesn’t restrict sex-selection abortion in any way.”

Naturally, Obama opposed the Franks bill. After all, Obama, as an Illinois state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived an abortion. In fact, he voted in 2001, 2002 and 2003 against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, an Illinois bill that was meant to provide protection for babies born alive after attempted abortions. Many of these newborns are hauled into janitors’ closets, where they are left to die.

Oddly enough, the “elite” media never mentioned this when Obama was running for president, that he was in favor of legalized infanticide, yet they sent battalions of reporters to Alaska to pore through Sarah Palin’s records – and came up empty.

The Franks bill that went down to defeat would have imposed fines and possibly prison terms on doctors who perform abortions for the sole purpose of controlling the child’s gender. The “mothers” would not have been charged.

One of the Democrats who voted against the bill, Rep. John Conyers, from Michigan, argued that “it tramples the rights of women under the guise of nondiscrimination.” Funny that Conyers said nothing about the “rights” of the youngest women, the ones still in the womb.

I find it bizarre that Obama has the nerve to charge absurdly that Republicans are waging “a war against women” when he sanctions the killing of unborn girls, who are the victims in the vast majority of sex-selection procedures. As one Republican congressman said, “There can be no rights for women if we don’t allow them the right to life. This is the ultimate war on women. If we don’t allow women to be born, we cannot talk about any other rights.”

According to one report on the issue, “Worldwide, we’re probably missing 200 million girls because of sex-selection abortions, and in America we have now allowed thousands of little girls to be dismembered, usually late in the pregnancy when they can feel extreme pain, simply because they are little girls. It’s gotten so that the most deadly words on the planet anymore are, ‘It’s a girl.’ ”

It is a sad commentary on modern society that something like sex-selective abortions happen anywhere. It is equally sad that Chellie Pingree and people of her ilk hold positions of power in our government. It’s no wonder that the American people, in huge numbers, regard Congress with fear and disgust. ###